Sunday, February 5, 2012

The Complete Guide to Fantasy War?

Dreaming out loud and water-testing rears its ugly head again. Between the finished fantasy miniatures rules for By This Axe, I Rule and outtake material for the domain-play sourcebook Hill Cantons: Borderlands I feel like I have enough material for something I have been dreaming about as twin-souled roleplayer/wargamer for years.

Namely a comprehensive, modular supplement for incorporating war and military campaigning into an old school fantasy roleplaying game—a certain something that would scratch a lot of itches for me at the same time.

My idea for this synthetic beast would be something that would allow you to be able to conduct a war as a series of stand-alone or interlinked mini-games under the umbrella of a unified one-stop shopping product. With it you could, for instance, use the abstract mass combat rules to play out a large-scale battle with little PC investment in one session, seamlessly dial down to a small-scale miniatures battle the next with the players pushing around their lead equivalents; run a raid in the next as part of a traditional rpg session—all the while running the campaign overall as a free-form matrix game.

The Guide would be fully compatible with pre-third edition D&D iteration and their related clones and copy cats. (Conversion would also be provided for Runequest, Stormbringer, Legend and their BRP-ilk if there is sufficient interest). In other word you keep playing with the rules you already use. A quick and easy conversion guide based on the ones currently inside By this Axe would translate your existing PCs, NPCs, and forces into system compatibility—and re-translate in-game effects back into immediately useful terms for your tabletop rpg campaign.

Features:

Abstract Mass Combat Rules. Think the paper and pencil rules of Mentzer's Companion set, minus a layer of bean-counting and with more options for pre-battle strategic and tactical choice and stratagems. Play will be enhanced by optional use of simple card or hex and cardboard mini-games (templates and materials to be included with the book).

Skirmish and Small Battle Miniatures Rules. This is the current core of By this Axe. Fast and furious rules for running fantasy and medieval-era battles with one figure being the equivalent of either 5 or 20 in-game creatures. They were des

Big Battle Miniatures Rules. A larger scale system for running the truly epic battles at 1:50 and 1:200 scale.

Siege Rules. Comprehensive rulesfor storming castles and other strongholds for both miniatures and the abstract combat rules. Guidelines for both the long, slow wearing down of fortifications and the sudden sharp shock of an assault.

Free Form War. Guidelines for using a simple, free-form “matrix-game” resolution for military affairs.

Battles as Adventure Locales. A chapter on how a GM can use battles, sieges, raids, etc. directly in a more traditional rpg session.

Guide to Affordable Alternatives to Miniatures. There is more than one way to get the experience of a miniatures tabletop without breaking your pocketbook. A rundown on proven shortcuts will be explored here.

Simple Campaign. A simple, abstract way to run battles, skirmishes, and raids with little book-keeping. A simple system will handle recruitment, objectives, operational maneuvers, and logistics.

Grand Campaign. The down-and-dirty granular way to do the same above. Heavy emphasis on the detailed bits that grease the sinews of war.

What do you think? Something worth pursuing? Something you'd use? Should I cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war?

1. Works cross-compatibly at all levels. I always thought it was strange that all of TSR's attempts at capturing war were all mechanically so incompatible with each other. Chainmail didn't really line up with Swords & Spells and Battlesystem. And none of them worked easily with Warmachine or the Birthright card battle game.

2. Takes little work to be compatible with the tabletop RPG you already playing.

3. Has some very simple and free-form levels to it for those who want to be able to work it in, but don't want to be juggling a bunch of spreadsheets and unit rosters. (Crazy grog that I am I tend to like that granularity, but I can see why it would swamp a GM).

I'd love something like this. What I am especially looking for is a good system for platoon level combat and a bit above, a system for managing a fief or a area of similar size, and a good system for siege combat.

By the way, I'm having trouble with the 'By This Axe I Rule' link. Anyone else?

Delta's Book of War is quite good, very elegant and balanced. The internal math hinges around a 1:10 scale so it's a bit tough as a model for larger-scale games. Both Book and By this Axe have a foot in Chainmail so there is some resemblance in how they play (though mine also has another foot in some even older school rules like Tony Bath's Hyborian campaign).

I was re-reading Battlesystem 1st ed. before the game tonight and it surprised me how little attention there was to integrating tabletop rpg play. The Bloodstone modules did, of course, but the rules proper just don't have much to say.

I'd be stoked to have you playtest any part that would jive organically with your own campaign. That'd be the point.

Yes to all! For our forth coming encounter, I would like to do the Grand Campaign...with some Abstract Mass Combat till we actually work out the logistics to haveour troops on the same table. Then when we actually domanage to marshal our forces do a few Big Battle Miniatures and Siege Rules....just a few thoughts butI think they are workable.

Back story and a good pretext are everythingto a well run campaign! We should start witha paper and pencil (notional encounter) with my light cavalry running into one of your boarder outposts or some such.

May is definitely doable for me, in the mean time building the back story willonly help add color to the game. Presentation is everything at a Con...)

Totally agree especially with medieval and fantasy campaigns. I have a few contexts I could plug in for a nice and bloody war: the overseas wars of the Overkingdom in the Hill Cantons, the border wars of the Colony in my Domain Game, Hyboria etc.

Ditto what Zavoda said. Be worth looking at Knights and Magick for inspiration too. Its one to one scale, oddly enough.I think especially proper rules for war and campaign management are lacking for D&D and have hardly been touched since Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign.

K&M was my very first set of mini rules. In fact I was involved in an effort to revive it with a second edition about 6 years ago (back when I was only doing historical minis).

It has some really clunky mechanics like each combat entailing a roll of a d10 and a d6, but it's comprehensiveness--a five-volume set with entire booklets on heraldry, painting, historical background, campaigns, etc.--is a major inspiration on how I am thinking about the project.

I love the idea. I have a loosely related system simmering on the back burner, and I'll bet many if not most of us do, but with your wide knowledge of games and experience on your projects so far there's no doubt at all you could really make something out of it, and actually get it done. I'll be very happy to help out with feedback and playtesting too.

The advice I'd give first - on the off-chance you don't already know - is keep the basic framework simple, modular and as multivalent as possible, and spend as much time as you can spare in the early stages smoothing, smoothing and smoothing some more, all the while making notes when the inspiration comes on detailed subsystems to link into it.

It's massive, but not so massive it can't be done, especially with the level of support there is here already. You could farm out individual elements, or at least farm out some of the stages in the development of them, at the very least the more detailed wishlisting and brainstorming.

Thanks, that's sound advice. I am thinking of having a top-level group of play testers that could be calling the shots from a strategic stage.

My typical impulse is to layer granular subsystem on top of subsystems, so I will be fighting that in this project (except in the Grand Campaign where the freak flag will be unfurled). KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) will be the guiding principle.

The good news is that I have a lot of springboard material already ready. Not only do I have the small mountain of material from By this Axe and Borderlands, I also have a number of notes from a very similar project I tried to do for medieval mini campaigns a while back.